Family Saga A Long Goodbye To The Old Florida

July 21, 1985|By Reviewed by Jean Patteson of The Sentinel Staff

In three generations, the MacIvey clan goes from dirt poor to filthy rich. Patrick D. Smith's novel of adventure and enterprise on the Florida frontier should be a success story, but in a strange, sad way, it's exactly the opposite.

The MacIveys are the archetypal pioneer family: simple, decent, strong. In the 1850s they travel by ox cart from Georgia to scratch a living from the scrub near present-day Gainesville. When Confederate Army deserters burn their cabin and barn, they press southward to the banks of the Kissimmee River, where they round up wild cattle and plant their first orange trees. Despite the ravages of mosquitoes, wild animals, floods, freezes and rustlers, the family endures and the piles of gold coins in their steamer trunks grow. The gold buys hundreds of acres in Miami during the 1920s boom years and tides them over the 1930s bust. By the 1960s, the MCI mark is branded not only on cattle hides and citrus crates, but also on banks and hotels.

This is the stuff a TV miniseries is made of. There are good guys (the MacIveys) and bad guys (outlaws, land dealers, developers). There's non-stop adventure and romance set against the backdrop of pristine wilderness and teeming boom town. And -- for the special-effects crew -- there are hurricanes, gun battles, man-eating alligators . . .

But what would Hollywood do with the ending? There's no living happily ever after for this family, or, Smith suggests, for this land. As Sol, the last of the MacIveys, realizes from the perspective of a lonely old age, in creating a new Florida, they've destroyed the old.

''If I could rip out the concrete and put back the woods, I would,'' Sol says. ''But I can't. Progress ain't reversible. What's done is done forever.'' Smith, who lives on Merritt Island, does a good job of depicting Florida the way it was before the concrete, but often his descriptive passages read rather like library-research lists of fauna and flora. For example:

And, ''At first the land was peppered with dwarf small cypress and pond cypress; then suddenly there loomed before them the mighty virgin bald cypress trees themselves, reaching up to a hundred and fifty feet in the air, some with bases seventy feet in circumference. . . . There were also gumbo-limbo trees, lancewoods, cocoplum bushes, oaks festooned with Spanish moss . . . '' It's almost as if the MacIveys themselves were created merely as a way to move the reader from one description of Old Florida to the next. When you put the book down, you are left with vivid images of prairies and swamps and wildlife, of the rough and tumble of frontier living. But one MacIvey is much like the next: the men tough and impulsive, the women smart and supportive.

The sad, perverse twist to the tale is that the MacIveys, because they love the land and want only to secure a future on it for their children, end up being a part of the force that fenced and paved and dredged the wilderness, changing it forever.